ARRRGH!!!

Oh where to begin. Let me update ya’ll on my current situation. My lawyer informed me that my husband’s application to change my status has been seating at my local immigration office since August 2009, Yeah, that long! That’s right, my future, in the hands of clerks at an office that sits only five miles away from me.

This Sunday I will be celebrating my two years anniversary. DH and I had plans of going out of town like we did last year to celebrate our first, but we are trying to save money and pay debts and all those pesky things that get in the way of being romantic. They don’t tell you those things when you read romance novels. They don’t tell you about the annoying traits that will make you want to kill your DH, or the disgusting things one has to witness when sharing a bathroom, or how the day to day life gets in the way of simply wanting to enjoy one’s marriage. They don’t tell you that the processes you have seen take only six months in your case will last 2 years with no solution looming in the future and putting a stall on your plans for life. Going to school, getting a job I enjoy, traveling, getting a license, getting a car, buying a house.

The INS is holding my future hostage, my plans, my dreams for tomorrow, the things I want to do, the things I want to become, they are all being held in the inexorable grasp of a governmental agency that apparently does not know what to do with me and has no rush in finding out. I am being held hostage and it seems to be just for their amusement. If they asked for some sort of ransom I am sure DH and I could come up with something, but I think they perversely enjoy making me wait, wait and wait.

I have no criminal records, speak perfect English, have not once received help from the government, I am young, healthy and able to work, willing to go to school, smart. Why exactly is the INS so against me? I sound wonderful on paper, hell if I were my own country I would want all my residents to be like me (modesty’s obviously not my forte).

Even though I talk about Canada and Europe every time I feel frustrated with my situation the truth is I don’t want to move. I want to stay in the U.S. I don’t want to uproot myself once more and go through all this process again. I also want to tear my hair out, gnaw my arm off and just give up.

I hear people telling me oh you are so strong, so determined. I am neither. It’s sheer and simple stubbornness. Well, it’s 50% stubbornness and 50% laziness. I am so tired I cannot imagine myself picking up and leaving after I have been here for nine years, almost a decade of my life as an unwanted guest. That’s enough to damage anyone’s self steam. When does it stop? When do they decide I am worth noticing? Do they care that my life has been in limbo for the past two years? The answers are, probably never, never and no.

It won’t stop, they are never going to think any immigrant is worth noticing and no, they don’t care about the past two years of my life or what is doing to my marriage and my psyche.

So when does one truly give up? I have dreams of saying Fuck Off! Flip them off and walk away to Europe where I become a blogging sensation, then an acclaimed writer and then Oprah would want to interview me and I would be like, sorry your country didn’t want me, now I don’t want it!

Sigh. Such petty dreams.

That’s the thing, like a fool who goes to her friends to complain about her boyfriend who cheats and then goes back to him; I will probably remain here until I am old and wrinkled. I will be waiting for them, counting my days, my weeks, my months and years for a reply. Waiting for that stupid official looking letter where they say “you will be interviewed on such and such date”.

Not only do I have to go through the humiliating process of explaining that yes, this is really my husband, yes we are really fucking, yes, he is the man I chose. No, not because of papers, no, I sleep on the left side of the bed; I don’t know his favorite color. Maybe ten years from now when I am comfortable in my lack of status they will say, sorry after ten years reviewing your case we have decided your request has been denied, you have 90 days to put your affairs in order and leave the country (which has happened to people here, I’m not making that shit up).

Argh!

Hopefully I will have a nicer post for tomorrow.

Happy New Year 2011

Another year is almost over, another year in this country, struggling to belong, struggling to get my affairs in order, struggling to organize my life, to start the life I want, struggling to find enough money to pay for some things, struggling to find a way to go to school (etc)

And in the middle of all that I am so happy. I am happy because I am healthy and in love, surrounded by family and full of friends. I am thin (yay diet), I am happy with myself, happy with my family, happy with the visitors I got from Colombia, my aunt and cousin whom I hadn’t seen in a decade.

I never thought eight years ago that there would come a time when Christmas wouldn’t depress me, when New Year’s Eve wouldn’t be a time to cry. Yet here I am, looking forward to tomorrow (and the insane skinny white dress I am wearing) but also looking forward to the bittersweet feeling when is midnight and I find myself still here for one more year.

While it sounds scary, the truth is that way of thinking has made me enjoy life and what it brings in a way that only uncertainty can. I feel so blessed (ugh for the nonbeliever in me) and so lucky I feel like I am bragging.

I will get teary eyed tomorrow. Teary eyed for that land that I truly belong to and I haven’t stepped on in a decade, I would get sad because its music stir my souls and makes my heart ache, I will be sad because I will remember all those other years when I was younger and sharing with other people I haven’t seen in so long and probably will never see again. I will cry for those moments lost, for those moments I didn’t appreciate because I didn’t know where never coming back. And still I will smile, smile for the plentiful in front of me, for the beautiful luck I have, for the overwhelming abundance of beautifulness that is my life.

This time, I celebrate New Year’s not only with my sister and brother, mother and husband, sister and brother in laws but also with my aunt and my cousin. I wonder if anyone but someone who has been separated from family can understand how monumental this moment is, how special it was seeing each other after so long, how touching it was that time and distance never made us strangers.

So, happy New Year readers, whoever you are. Enjoy your day, near you family, wife, husband, partner, friend, cat, dog, and TV set, whoever and whatever you have in your life that makes you happy. Think of the year ahead and expect the best.

Smile, laugh, love, live.

AND HERE WE GO AGAIN

Yesterday I heard back from my lawyer. I was hoping this whole process would take at most six months and that after half a year I would be flying to Europe to go to Ireland to see the Cliffs of Mohr and the land of Oscar Wilde, or England to visit Platform 9 ¾ or Hawaii to see the sunrise on top of a dormant volcano, or hell Indiana to see my in-laws but as things stand I can’t even legally drive to buy some chimichangas at the Don Ramon Restaurant down the street.

Yours truly has to wait for at least six months for a judge to decide to reopen my case, six months for some overworked middle age man/woman with too much on his plate to care about me, to look at the black and white “facts” and decide if they reopen my case and let me prove to them that DH and I are REALLY married, six months for some stranger who doesn’t know me at all to decide if I am worthy of staying here. I guess in paper I sound good, I have paid my taxes, and I haven’t committed any felonies or misdemeanors or broken ANY law. I speak the language, I have gone native. But until everything is finally done I will not feel at ease. My future rests in (on) the desk of someone stranger who doesn’t know anything about me, or what I’ve been through, or what I have brought and could still bring to this country, my future lays in the hand of someone who doesn’t know my awesomeness. It’s a scary thought to be just one more random, anonymous spic.

Since I refuse to remain quiet about all the hullaballoo that’s going on in the U.S. ever since I stopped writing here I am, back to this beautiful place where I can be myself and express my idea and have total strangers tell me what they think. I’m sorry but the U.S. is going nuts! And it all seemed to explode the moment I said I was going to shut up! Cruel, simply cruel to have such juicy crazies to bite on and find myself with no teeth.

I hope I haven’t lost some of you, those precious few who take some moments out of your lives to listen (read) my drivel and who are not by blood or law, related to me. If I haven't completely lost you, then please stick around because some of my not so smart, sometimes funny rhetoric is back.

Oh if only they (IRS, ICE, UCIS, etc, same entity different acronyms) knew just how native I have gone I think they would let me stay. I am a woman without land, an immigrant without a country. I belong nowhere. I know I have a flare for dramatics but people when I tell you I have no land I mean I have NO LAND. I am an effing pariah!

It’s kind of sad to find oneself at Bruzz Room, they whitest place you could go to, to see the Rays lose like little bitches to the Rangers and find yourself surrounded by Colombians watching a friendly game of football (soccer for those of you who think Football means pigskin and shoulder pads) and have them call you a race traitor because you are not watching the football game but are watching baseball. Baseball? How dare I? Not even Hispanic baseball like the Caribbean Series but American “World” Series Baseball. The offspring of my offspring will feel the shame this ancestor brought upon them.

Never mind that I grew up in Venezuela and baseball is the national pass time. Never mind that in Colombia, Football not Baseball is the national pass time. Are you following my conundrum here? No matter who I root for, no matter who I follow it will be the wrong choice. You were raised in Venezuela, you should follow baseball. Your family and you are all from Colombia: Viva el Pibe y la seleccion. I am living in the U.S. I am supposed to embrace the culture: Bring on the cheese hats, the foam fingers, the expensive cheap beer and all the sports that come with it.

Next year in April I will celebrate my ninth year in the U.S. Six more years than I ever lived in Colombia, more than half the time I spent in Venezuela. How can I have ANY identity at all? I am forgetting some of my Spanish. I no longer read books in my first language. I have almost forgotten who I was back then... I was so young and so damn stupid when I came into this country. I was nineteen but in reality I was younger. I was pampered and silly and spoiled and I did all my growing up here. I became a woman here. Let’s enjoy this Lifefime moment.

This is home. I love Colombia. I love Venezuela. I will never, ever forget that I am a part that, that I came from spicy looks, cumbia smelling heat, coffee smelling sounds and tall those discombobulated senses that make one a Latino. I, however, am becoming something else.

I am not sure if I am happy about it. I am not sure I can belong here. I want to stick seventeen people in a small car before I go to a party (that stereotype is so true) I want to teach my kids (If I have any) to dance as soon as they can walk. I want to eat pig blood and rice and not find it icky (I so do) I want to drink aguardiente and dance gaitas in December. I want to be everything that my race, breed, culture, background demands of me but I can’t. I am a hybrid. I am a mutt within a mutt.

Not to sound all existentialist, but where the fuck do I belong?